History of the Internet: Timeline

By Dave Marshall

This section is a summary of some of the material contained in
Hobbes'
Internet Timeline and also contains sources from
Pros Online -
Internet History, What is the Internet? and History of Internet and
WWW : View from Internet Valley and a variety of text books. Consult these
source for more detailed information.

1836

-- Telegraph. Cooke and Wheatstone patent it. Why is this relevant?

Revolutionised human (tele)communications.

Morse Code a series of dots and dashes used to communicate between
humans. This is not a million miles away from how computers communicate
via (binary 0/1) data today. Although it is much slower!!

Packet Radio Network (PRNET) experiment starts with ARPA funding. Most
communications take place between mobile vans.

1981

-- Things start to come together

BITNET, the "Because It's Time NETwork" Started as a
cooperative network at the City University of New York, with the first
connection to Yale

Provides electronic mail and listserv servers to distribute
information, as well as file transfers

CSNET (Computer Science NETwork) established to provide networking
services (specially E-mail) to university scientists with no access to
ARPANET. CSNET later becomes known as the Computer and Science Network.

1982

-- TCP/IP defines future communication

DCA and ARPA establishes the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and
Internet Protocol (IP), as the protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP,
for ARPANET.

Why is this relevant?

Leads to one of the first definitions of an internet as a
connected set of networks, specifically those using TCP/IP, and Internet
as connected TCP/IP internets.

1982 (Cont)

EUnet (European UNIX Network) is created by EUUG to provide E-mail and
USENET services. Original connections between the Netherlands, Denmark,
Sweden, and UK

A number of Net related companies go public, with Netscape leading the
pack.

Registration of domain names is no longer free.

Technologies of the Year: WWW, Search engines (WAIS development).

New WWW technologies Emerge Technologies

Mobile code (JAVA, JAVAscript, ActiveX),

Virtual environments (VRML),

Collaborative tools (CU-SeeMe)

1996

-- Microsoft enter

12.8 Million Hosts, 0.5 Million WWW Sites.

Internet phones catch the attention of US telecommunication companies
who ask the US Congress to ban the technology (which has been around for
years)

The WWW browser war begins , fought primarily between Netscape and
Microsoft, has rushed in a new age in software development, whereby new
releases are made quarterly with the help of Internet users eager to
test upcoming (beta) versions.